RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/no-deal-brexit-yes-if-macron-vetoes-an-extension/

This week European leaders will meet in solemn conclave, with and without Prime Minister Theresa May, to determine whether or not to extend the U.K.’s membership of the European Union and, if so, for how long. Brits have until recently paid relatively little attention to this occasion since it was generally agreed that the other EU members wanted the Brits to stay in. All doubts were on the British side, where a heated debate now seems to be moving towards a cross-party Con–Lab agreement to strike a pretend Brexit that would keep Britain inside most of the EU’s economic institutions, regulations, and tariffs for an indefinite period. There’s a lot to play for still — half the Tory party hates May’s deal — but for the moment the ball is in the court of Brussels.

And for the first time, one of the Europeans may say no. Not just any old European either, but the French president, Emmanuel Macron.

The actual choice before the European Council asks should Britain be allowed to remain in the EU for a short time (i.e., until June 30) ,to sign off on May’s withdrawal deal or nearest equivalent; or a long time (another year or even longer), to enable a different deal to be negotiated; or no time at all, being shown the door on Friday. All Europeans except Macron favor some version of the first two options. If you’re interested in such matters, Wolfgang Munchau in today’s FT has an informative analysis that suggests that if Corbyn and May can agree on the general principles of leaving the EU, then the good ship BRINO (Brexit in Name Only) can sail between the Scylla of No Deal and the Charybdis of Another Referendum to reach an agreed departure date in December. Macron, however, is reportedly tired of these endless discussions and skeptical that the Brits will ever agree on a bipartisan deal that has public support and a chance of survival. He is thinking of exercising the French veto to prevent any extension at all, and so in effect bringing about a no-deal Brexit from outside.

http://daphneanson.blogspot.com/

Robert Sarah is a Guinean prelate of the Catholic Church. A Cardinal since 20 November 2010, he was appointed prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments by Pope Francis on 23 November 2014.

“I would like to explain why I, a son of Africa, allow myself to address the West. The Church is the guardian of civilization. I am convinced that western civilization is passing at present through a mortal crisis. It has reached the extreme of self-destructive hate….

How could I not emphasize the threat posed by Islamism? Muslims despise the atheistic West…. A West that denies its faith, its history, its roots, and its identity is destined for contempt, for death, and disappearance.”

Indeed,

‘”It is a false exegesis to use the Word of God to promote migration. God never wanted these rifts,” Cardinal Sarah told French publication Valeurs Actuelles before going on to blast bishops who “say fuzzy things, vague, imprecise, to escape criticism, and they marry the stupid evolution of the world.”

Sarah, head of the Vatican liturgy office, minced no words in his denunciation of the prevailing viewpoint among liberal Catholics, which states that the faithful betray Christ by wanting stricter immigration policies.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/jeremy-corbyns-labour-long-ignored-complaints-of-anti-semitism/

Despite receiving more than 850 formal complaints, the British labour party has failed to take action against, and on occasion defended, members who have made outrageously anti-Semitic claims, according to a new exposé published by the Sunday Times.

Data obtained by the Times show that party leader Jeremy Corbyn’s office had received 863 complaints relating to anti-Semitism as of March 8, 2019, but only intervened in 101 of those cases. In total, 454 of the cases remain unresolved, including 249 cases in which no action has been taken. And in those cases that were resolved, 191 members faced no sanction, 145 received a warning the Times characterized as a “slap on the wrist,” and just 29 members were expelled.

Many of the complaints that failed to prompt permanent expulsions were based on a party member having explicitly endorsed an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory. In one such case, a trade-union official in Manchester was readmitted to the party after sharing a tirade that blamed “Jewish Israelis” for the September 11 terrorist attacks. In another, a councilor in Lancashire was readmitted after decrying the nefarious influence of the “Jewish media” and the “Rothschilds” and after having defended those epithets as “blanket term[s] of description without any racist connotations.”

In other cases, members who said things such as “Heil Hitler,” “F**k the Jews,” and “Jews are the problem” have remained in the party despite Corbyn’s office having received complaints about them over a year ago.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/op-eds/the-uks-remainers-will-tear-down-democracy-and-all-its-rules-to-get-their-way

“The United Kingdom,” the New York Times proclaims with its customary tone of Olympian certainty, “has gone mad.”

That publication has become almost comically anti-British over the past two years, but on this occasion, it has a point — albeit an unintended one.

The author, Thomas Friedman, offers us his lofty diagnosis of Britain’s collective dementia. It is caused, he informs us, by “Conservative hard-liners who used to care about business but are now obsessed with restoring Britain’s ‘sovereignty’ over any economic considerations.”

What he means by “hard-liners,” to be clear, is “MPs who accept the 2016 referendum result,” something all sides promised to do in advance. It is worth pointing out that 12 months after the referendum, there was a general election, at which both the Labour and Conservative parties promised unequivocally to uphold the people’s verdict.

Only now, it turns out that when they made that promise, quite a few candidates had their fingers crossed behind their backs.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13892/iran-regime-cave-in

“Yes, the accused fled from a country where virtual bullies push against science, knowledge and expertise and resort to conspiracy theories to find a scapegoat for all the problems because they know well that finding an enemy, spy or someone to blame is much easier than accepting responsibility and complicity in a problem”. — Kaveh Madani, one of Iran’s leading environmentalists, who recently fled to London.

Despite its economic crisis, Iran continues to provide hundreds of millions of dollars every year to terrorists. ” When you throw in the money provided to other terrorists, the total comes close to one billion dollars. Let’s pause to consider that, because it bears repeating:The Iranian regime spends nearly a billion dollars a year just to support terrorism”. — Nathan A. Sales, U.S. State Department Ambassador-at-Large and Coordinator for Counterterrorism.

This impressive decline of the Iranian regime is being accompanied by petty and repressive laws. Iran recently handed down a sentence of 33 years in prison and 148 lashes to a prominent Iranian lawyer, Nasrin Sotoudeh, who dared to defend girls who were protesting Iran’s forced veiling laws. In another recent incident, an Iranian couple were arrested after their public marriage proposal went viral on social media.

The Islamic Republic of Iran today, through its terror proxies and puppet regimes, has been extending its hegemony to many capitals of the Middle East: Tehran, Baghdad, Damascus, Beirut, Sanaa. Iran continues to threaten the Middle East, the Mediterranean basin and potentially Europe. Forty years after its theocratic revolution in 1979, the mullahs speak (wishfully, one assumes) of a “declining” America.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14001/india-women-discrimination

In spite of the recurring lip service, however — as well as attempts at reform — the situation for women in India remains unacceptable. Women face discrimination in every aspect of life.

Women in India also continue to be victims of various forms of violence, including being aborted, infanticide, genital mutilation, honor killings, acid attacks, sex-trafficking and rape. In fact, 99% of sexual assaults go unreported. Last year, two cases of child rape, allegedly perpetrated by police officers and a politician, led to mass protests demanding greater protection for women and children.

“The cultural design of oppression is so clever, that it instils a habit of distrust and trains women to demean, dismiss and discount other women… The real genius of this system lies in the fact that oppression has been recast as a virtue.” — Deepa Narayan, author of Chup: Breaking the Silence About India’s Women.

Addressing an International Women’s Day gathering in Varanasi on March 8, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi stressed the “crucial role” that women play in his country’s development.
Indian President Ram Nath Kovind echoed this sentiment on social media, tweeting:
“Women are the sheet-anchor of society, an inspiration for their families and for our nation. Let us strive to ensure equality of opportunity for every women [sic] and every girl child.”

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/women-s-rights-trial-casts-light-on-hardline-approach-in-saudi-arabia-a-1258460.html

Three Saudi women are currently on trial in Riyadh, charged with espionage and conspiracy. The truth is that the women merely advocated for women’s rights. They have reportedly been tortured in a case that has cast light on the kingdom’s new hardline approach.

Eman al-Nafjan must have guessed they were coming for her. A few weeks before her arrest by Saudi authorities, the women’s-rights activist changed her profile picture on WhatsApp. Instead of her face and soft, brown hair, it showed a reptile with its mouth open. Deep in the animal’s throat was a frog, petrified by fear, at the moment of death.

It was a harbinger of doom. Nafjan, 38 years old and a well-organized mother of four children, had been committed to fighting for human rights in her country, especially women’s rights for over a decade. At the time, her youngest daughter was just 2.

Sometime between May 15 and 18, Nafjan was arrested. Around the same time, Saudi secret police rounded up other female activists from their homes. For years, the women have been fighting together for the right to drive and the abolition of Saudi Arabia’s so-called guardianship law, which gives men in the kingdom extensive control over their female relatives. Men can be notified via a government app when their wives or daughters want to cross the border.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14018/turkey-erdogan-hagia-sophia-mosque

“When Constantinople fell to the Ottoman Turks in 1453, virtually all of the city’s surviving cathedrals and churches were — after being desecrated and thoroughly plundered — forcibly seized and turned over to the Turks’ religious establishment to be converted to mosques and used as Muslim properties.” — Dr. Alexandros K. Kyrou, professor of history, Salem State University.

Nine other former Hagia Sophia churches are either being used as mosques already or are in the process of being renovated for this purpose. The youngest of these, in Trabzon, was converted into a mosque in 2013. — Ersoy Soydan, assistant professor of communications at Kastamonu University and author of Churches and Monasteries in Turkey

Sadly, Turkey’s Greek community as a whole, let alone that of Istanbul by itself, is not sizeable enough to oppose or protest infringements on their historic cathedral. The 1914-1923 genocide of Greek Christians in Anatolia, and subsequent atrocities against the survivors — such as the 1955 anti-Greek pogroms in Istanbul — have almost completely wiped out the region’s Greek populace.

Addressing a rally ahead of the March 31 municipal elections in Turkey, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan announced plans to convert the Hagia Sophia museum, originally a Byzantine cathedral, into a mosque.

Erdogan repeated this statement the following day during a televised interview. “Hagia Sophia will no longer be called a museum,” he declared. “Its status will change. We will call it a mosque.”

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14026/iran-floods-mullahs

The natural disaster has also revealed some of the fundamental weaknesses of a dysfunctional system that, having devoted its principal resources and much of its energies to promoting a weird ideology, seems to be incapable of coping with basic tasks of a normal nation-state.

President Hassan Rouhani, spending a week-long holiday in the island resort of Qishm, appeared beyond reach. “Supreme Guide” Ali Khamenei, too busy with a poetry gathering, was unavailable for days and found it unnecessary even to comment.

Iranians watched in amazement as special units of the regular army moved to save lives, prevent floods from spreading further, reopen roads and even start repairing some of the damage. Buoyed by the presence of regular army units, thousands of volunteers also poured in to help deal with the disaster. Contacts across Iran describe the solidarity shown by average citizens as “exemplary”, implying that Iran deserves a better government.

It may take weeks if not months before the full facts of the current nationwide floods in Iran are established. But we already know that the floods represent one of the biggest natural disasters Iran has suffered in half a century.

According to provisional data from the Islamic Red Crescent, the floods struck in over 300 towns and cities in 22 of Iran’s 31 provinces, affecting 18.5 million people, almost a quarter of the nation’s total population. Some 1.2 million people have been made homeless, at least temporarily.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/brexit-debate-british-independence/

Charles Moore today ends his weekly Telegraph column, which has become required reading for both supporters and opponents of Brexit, with a gloomy forecast that the only way of saving Brexit from its betrayal by a Tory prime minister and government is her replacement by a new leader who then reforms the Tory party along lines that would allow local Tory associations to deselect Remain MPs and replace them with Leavers. His final paragraph reads:

It does not sound very likely, does it? The only reason to think that it might happen is the prospect of the alternative, which is annihilation.

Does “annihilation” sound a trifle over-dramatic? Well, I suspect Moore intends that it should have a shock effect on his readers — a metaphorical shaking of the shoulders to make them realize what’s at stake. What is at stake is not the physical annihilation of the Brits but the absorption of their self-governing democracy into an undemocratic European empire called the European Union. And that prospect justifies the gloomiest of forecasts.